After 99 years, Einstein’s greatest scientific achievement is undefeated.
And Then There’s Maude
In modern physics, matter in the universe is made up of quanta or “particles” such as electrons, protons and neutrons. These particles can be said to interact through various forces or fields (strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravitational) for which there are corresponding “field quanta” such as photons and gluons. These quanta can are often seen as the particles that make up these fields, and while things are a bit more complicated it is the right basic idea. We have a lot of experimental evidence for these quanta, but there is one that’s often mentioned for which we have no experimental evidence. That’s the graviton.
Imaginary Neutrinos
A new paper proposes that neutrinos may be tachyons. This is being presented in the press as a claim that neutrinos move faster than light, but that’s not the focus of the paper. Instead the paper argues that the electron neutrino could have an imaginary mass.
But No Simpler
Recently there’s been a flurry of news articles claiming that “Quantum physics just got simpler!” as if new research has finally solved a big mystery of physics. Not so, when you look at the actual research. The work looks at a connection between particle-wave duality, and something known as entropic uncertainty.
Quacks Like a Duck
The image above features a neuron on the left, and a simulation of large scale galaxy clusters on the right. They look somewhat similar in structure, and if the internet is to be believe, this means something. And it does. Not that the universe is alive, or the cosmos is like a giant brain, but simply that sometimes two radically different things can have similarities in structure.
And the Number Shall Be Three
In earlier posts about dark matter, I’ve written about how neutrinos would seem to be a good candidate, but there simply aren’t enough of them to account for all of dark matter. As far as we can tell, there are three types (flavors) of neutrinos, and we know the upper limit of their mass from the distribution of galaxies in the universe. So the three known neutrino flavors can’t be the solution to dark matter.
Twist of Fate
The next time someone tries to describe quantum theory as mysterious or magical, imagine how silly it would seem if the same arguments were applied to polarized light.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Often when talking about gravity and general relativity the “fabric of spacetime” will be mentioned. This fabric is often visualized as a kind of rubbery sheet that can be bent and stretched by the presence of masses. We use this kind of imagery so often that one might imagine that’s actually what spacetime is. But if spacetime is a fabric, it is the same type of fabric used to make the Emperor’s new clothes.
Light Matters
The inherent speed of light is built into the very nature of what light is. Since the fundamental leptons and quarks that comprise matter have electric charge, they are also subject to the fundamental nature of light speed. All the strange aspects of time dilation and warped gravity work in such a way that the speed of light is always preserved.